Sunday, March 11, 2012

First let's get this out of the way, there probably never was a major matriarchal society throughout human history. No one has ever found evidence of such a society beyond the rumours of the Greeks about the Amazons. What was, however, the basic human norm was a system of matrilinear descent. This makes perfect biological sense as it is very hard to not know who your mother was while "who's your daddy?" remains to this day part of the lexicon. And it was from the switch from matrilinear descent to patrilinear descent that the patriarchy came.

Think about it. Patrilinear descent and passing of property is dependent on absolute knowledge of who is a child's father meaning the sex life of the mother must be known and controlled just for patriarchy to exist. It is from this switch that the obscene concept of "illegitimate" children comes from and I say obscene because it is. Placing such a label on an innocent child is about as obscene as it gets. The evidence of history is clear if largely and willfully ignored. Matrilinear descent was the norm throughout most of human history and such cultures are largely peaceful by nature and egalitarian in regard to the sexes. In a world that has been dominated by patriarchial thinking since roughly 1500 BCE, egalitarian can appear down right matriarchal.

Most of ancient history as still taught to this day in grade schools and undergrad universities is pure garbage and actual historians are well aware of this but allow it to be perpetuated. We still teach that the Tigris and the Euphrates fertile crescent is the "cradle of civilization" when the earliest known civilization has been known to predate that by almost six thousand years! Known since the early 1960s. It was in central Anatolia or modern Turkey first uncovered by James Mellaart at Catal Huyuk where exploration continues to this day and dozens of contemporary cities in that area have also now been found. It was a Mother Goddess culture that later spread to Egypt, the Indus valley and the large islands of the eastern Mediterranean. All of those cultures were also matrilinear in nature. They were also all, at least originally, Mother Goddess civilizations. In a history that spans around five thousand years to the time of the Mesopotamian cities, this civilization never built walled cities or is there any evidence of ANY war but rather extensive trade networks.

Circa 1900 Sir Arthur Evans excavated the "Palace of Knossos" on Crete and shocked the world with the announcement that the Minoan civilization was a Goddess culture. Today we know that the centre of the Minoan civilization was actually on Thera, known today as Santorini which was a volcano that erupted circa 1500 BCE (believe it or not the exact date is still debated) in the most violent eruption in all of recorded history. The Minoans dominated the entire eastern Mediterranean with trade and established trading settlements all over the entire eastern coastal regions including major ones on the Nile delta. The explosion of Thera is almost certainly the origin of the stories of Atlantis especially when you consider the habour of Thera was the caldera of the volcano and naturally had the concentric circles of water and land that Plato wrote about. Further evidence is in that the civilization established by the Minoans was lightyears ahead of anything else on the planet with hot and cold indoor plumbing and flush toilets, earthquake proof construction methods that were engineered to naturally cool and heat themselves and furniture and art work that would look at home in any modern home today. As a Goddess culture, the descent was matrilinear and there was absolute equality of the sexes.

Until very very recently historians have ignored the influence of the Minoan culture on the western world. Our world today would be vastly different had Thera stayed quiet with a high degree of probability that no patriarchy would have found a foothold and the Abrahamic religions would be minor footnotes. Think of the intellectual dishonesty involved in ignoring the influence of the single most important event in human history for when Thera did explode it changed weather as far away as China and Japan, the tsunami that resulted scoured the entire eastern Mediterranean coastlines of all settlements save a few in the lee of major islands. What was left of the Minoan culture was on the high ground of Crete and that was immediately invaded by the Mycenaean Greeks and the entire Greek civilization thought today the origin of modern civilization was built on the bones of the Minoans with patriarchy overlaid. What was left of the Minoan culture survived in Phrygia (Turkey) having come full circle back to where the first Goddess culture civilization began. The Phrygians retained matrilinear descent traditions and the Mother Goddess then went from there to Athens and later Rome. During the fifth century CE the christians hunted down and killed "all the daughters and sons of the Mother Goddess" throughout Phrygia after killing all the priestesses of Cybele at their Roman Phrygianum on the Vatican hill in their beds and burning the library of Alexandra and killing the library's last and greatest scholar, Hypatia of Alexandria with a death of a thousand cuts done with seashells by a christian mob. Europe immediately plunged into the Dark Ages as a result. This is christian historical legacy this and the prior killing off of all the gnostic christians giving rise to the brand of christianity, perhaps better called Paulianity has cursed the world to this day.

Friday, March 9, 2012

The answer to this lies in the very beginning of the Bible and is clear to anyone who removes the cultural blinders from their eyes to see what the story of Adam and Eve is actually saying. It is first necessary to understand the symbols being used. Whether the tradition you hold to within christianity says it was the apple or the pomegranate that was "the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil" matters not when you realize both of these fruits were sacred to the Mother Goddess. The christian "villain" in the story is the serpent. From the beginning of recorded history, the serpent has been held sacred, again, to the Mother Goddess. So even before we get started the story suddenly is no longer a creation story but a war story.

Consider, the very name "Adam" was originally a notaricon of the first letters of the four directions, a distinctly Pagan concept to this day. Consider, Yahweh tells Adam and Eve that if they eat from the tree of knowledge, they will die. Yahweh does not want them to gain knowledge, he wants them to be stupid! The serpent, as a stand in for the Mother Goddess, tells Eve (notice the Mother Goddess speaks to the woman rather than the man) and points out Yahweh is lying through his teeth. Hardly the attribute of a Divine parent with his kids best interest in mind is it? Eve eats the divine fruit and invents clothing. The creation of fabric was the providence of women historically in every ancient culture. Accident? I hardly think so. In the spirit of the egalitarian nature of ancient Goddess cultures, Eve shares the fruit with Adam. They don't die. So who told the truth? Then we learn from Yahweh's internal dialogue? with himself? that there is also a tree of life that grants eternal life and Yahweh is totally freaked out at the idea that Adam and Eve eat that as well and thus live forever. So much for the eternal life part of christianity from the beginnings but wait, Mother Goddess traditions are base on the idea that the "soul" is the divine part of the individual that IS part of the Mother Goddess and thus eternal. So Yahweh actually wants people to be stupid and die, the "evil" serpent (Mother Goddess) wants them to be educated and know they live forever.

Let's dig a bit deeper into this rather simple story because there is a lot more to see. Let us look at the garden of Eden itself. Adam and Eve are in a place where they pretty much just have to be simple hunters and gatherers with the addition of horticulture which is simple and effective. A perfect allegory for the neolithic Goddess culture circa 10,000 BCE to 4000 BCE in central Anatolia (modern Turkey). They are punished by being expelled from this place and now have to till the earth for their bread "by the sweat of their brow" with the very earth not cooperating with them. Eve is further punished with difficult births and being forced ever after to submit to Adam and liking it.

Now let us look at Cain and Able where the curtain is actually pulled away from this farce once and for all. Cain is a farmer and makes sacrifices to Yahweh of the fruit of his labour, bread. Able is a goat herder and makes bloody sacrifices of killing animals. True to the nature of a "god" who acts like a petty vindictive child himself, Yahweh likes the blood sacrifice and turns up his nose at the bread. The sacrament of eating bread as part of ritual is one of the oldest Mother Goddess traditions that gives thanks for the fruits of horticulture (as opposed to agriculture) which was, once again, the providence of women in ancient cultures. Wait, it gets better! Cain is sent into exile for killing his brother after being rejected by Yahweh, to the land of Nod, east of Eden and then the curtain is pulled back on this story because Cain is first afraid anyone who will encounter him will kill him (anyone? who?) and lives among the people of his wife. Wait a minute, weren't Adam and Eve the original people and their boys the original children? Where did these folks living "east of Eden" come from? Whole cities of them? Oh, that is fairly simple when you realize this whole damn story is about a temperamental LOCAL diety who brags about creating the world when his own story proves that, just as was his bullshit about the tree of good and evil, that "creation" is a lying sack of excrement because there are whole, and apparently large, groups of people he did NOT create.

It was early christians who ran with this whole concept of "original sin" and laid it on the shoulders of the daughters of Eve when clearly Adam ate the fruit as well. Yahweh wants people to be stupid and what was the actions of the early christians? They burned the library of Alexandria, not once but several times.....book burnings, hatred of knowledge. To this day they fight science with garbage and try to prevent actual knowledge being part of children's education. Yahweh is a proven liar, wants stupid people who die and gets his rocks off on bloody dead animals. Christians have made the earth's ground run red with blood ever since and finally Yahweh hated women over men which is simply continued to this day in the war on women. And let us not forget that the promise of eternal life is now held by christians as a condition of subservience to their rather bizarre cult of Jesus beliefs rather than the birthright of all.

The real meanings of this story are crystal clear...and not at all pretty. Christians hate women because this is hardwired into the very nature of their theology from the very first part of their holy book.